Montgomery County Council to drop police station closures

Lobbies at Gaithersburg, Bethesda locations were to be shut down overnight

Overnight closure of the lobbies of the county's Bethesda and Gaithersburg police stations has been snatched from the budget chopping block after the County Council on Thursday moved that line item onto a "wish list" of likely additions to the budget that takes effect July 1.

Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett's proposed fiscal 2010 budget, presented in February, includes a line item to close the front lobbies of the Bethesda and Gaithersburg stations from 1 to 6 a.m., saving $316,000 by eliminating the two non-sworn clerks at each of the stations. Officers would have continued using the station as before.

Police officials insisted that the move would not threaten public safety. Emergency phones would be installed outside the stations to reach officers inside.

After those assurances, Councilman Roger Berliner, whose district includes Bethesda, asked the police department to consider the same step for the Germantown, Wheaton and Silver Spring stations.

On Thursday, the full council voted unanimously to put the $316,000 line item for closing the Bethesda and Gaithersburg stations onto a reconciliation wish list that the council will try to find room for by May 14 as it hammers out the $4 billion-plus budget.

"In the beginning, based on the representations made by police, it wasn't clear to me why it couldn't be done for all the stations — what is good for the goose is good for the gander," Berliner (D-Dist. 1) of Potomac said after the council session. "So when I pushed on that, we began to hear more clearly the impacts. … The more I heard about it, the less comfortable I was."

In the past, the reconciliation list has generally been considered likely for approval, but the county's fiscal challenges and a pending request for a state education waiver is casting uncertainty over the budget process this year. Leggett (D) and the council are pursuing the waiver — on a requirement to not reduce per-student funding from one year to the next — of $80 million to help balance the county's budget. The state Board of Education is expected to decide on Montgomery's request as early as Friday.

Even if the waiver does not come through, Councilman Michael J. Knapp says overnight hours for the police stations are too important not to fund.

"We're going to put it in," Knapp (D-Dist. 2) of Germantown said after Thursday's council session, during which he also proposed adding 10 slots to the police department's August recruit class.

"The number of ways there are to find that money by cutting less-important things is so numerous it's ludicrous that we're even having the conversation," he said.

He pointed as an example to $500,000 for studying bus rapid transit: "It's a good idea, love it, it's a good thing to do, but compared to keeping police stations open, it's not even close." He also suggested paring three hours off libraries' Wednesday schedules, which he said would save about $50,000 per library per year: "It's not that you don't like libraries … but we're going to shut a police station?"